Throughout this application, various publications are referenced within parentheses. The disclosures of these publications in their entireties are hereby incorporated by reference into this application in order to more fully describe the state of the art as known to those skilled therein as of the date of the invention described and claimed herein.
It has been suggested that autoantibodies may cause schizophrenia or mental illness, and that patients with schizophrenia or mental illness may have antibodies to specific antigens in human neurons, but to date, such antigens have not been identified or well characterized (DeLisi, L. E., Weber, R. J., Pert, C. B., Are there antibodies against brain in sera from schizophrenic patients? Review and Prospectors. Biol. Psychiatry 1985; 20: 94-119; Ganguli, R., Rabin, B. S., Kelly, R. H., Lyte, M., Ragu, U., Clinical and laboratory evidence of autoimmunity in acute schizophrenia. Annals New York Academy of Science 1987; 496: 676-685).
The subject invention describes antibodies from patients with schizophrenia that react with an antigen expressed in human neuroblastoma cells in tissue culture and in the human central nervous system.